A student at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1883–1884, Willard Leroy Metcalf was one of the pioneering American artists to spend summers at Giverny, the French town made famous by Claude Monet. Metcalf’s paintings were some of the first examples of American Impressionism to be seen stateside upon his return home in 1889. In 1897 he became a founding member of the Ten American Painters—among them Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, Frank W. Benson, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, J. Alden Wier, Edmund Tarbell, and Robert Reid—who had become dissatisfied with the restrictive practices of New York’s Society of American Artists, an organization formed in 1874 as an earlier response to the conservative nature of the National Academy of Design.
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Metcalf began painting in 1874 and opened a studio in Boston in 1876. A scholarship enabled him to take art courses at the Boston Museum School and his first exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery provided him funds for travel to Europe. He studied with several artists in France, England, and Brittany, and met John Twachtman and Theodore Robinson during his trip. He was painting at Giverny by 1886 and was joined by other American painters soon after. He returned to the U.S. and opened a New York studio, finding work as a portrait painter, illustrator, and teacher, but struggled to gain any meaningful success. He traveled to Cuba in 1904 for a mural commission and began to summer at Old Lyme in 1905. His career burgeoned during this period. In 1907, he won the Corcoran Gallery of Art gold medal and his painting, May Night, became the first contemporary American painting purchased by the museum. Between 1909 and 1921 Metcalf spent time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, the time period in which this painting was executed. He continued to travel extensively, painting around the Eastern U.S. and in Europe. In 1923, one of his paintings sold for $13,000, a record for the sale of the art of a living American painter.
Metcalf was called “the poet laureate of the New England hills” and his affection for the region’s seasonal beauty is evident in this view of the Cornish, New Hampshire countryside. In a tapestry of short, feathery brushstrokes, Metcalf takes as his subject a luminous expanse of meadow, framed in fall foliage and cut through by a furrow (sillon) that meanders up the hill to a distant farm.